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EVENTS

It was my first time back on the show in months, following family matters that have now settled. And we’re sorry, but we forgot to mention that — and there’s no way to soften the blow — there is going to be a three-week gap before the next show. A tiny little point to overlook, this. Derp.

Mostly the break is due to some shuffling in our crew. We bid a fond farewell to our longtime and most capable of producers, Frank Paschal, who is leaving us for the painted deserts of Arizona where new life opportunities beckon. Our other producer will be unavailable during this time as well. We’ll see you all again soon (April 19th). Until then, sound off on today’s show (video to be posted soon).

If you’d like to help the ACA in their Camp Quest sponsorship, please go to http://www.atheist-community.org/donate/ and include note with your donation earmarking it for Camp Quest Texas. We are donating $2500 to sponsor four campers.

Camp Quest Texas keeps growing each year. This year, The Atheist Community of Austin has just o sponsor four campers at a cost of $2500. If you would like to help support the ACA in this effort, please visit http://www.atheist-community.org/donate/ and send us a memo with your donation indicating you’d like the money to be earmarked for Camp Quest. Anything we raise in excess of the original $2500 will also go to support additional campers.

If you’re not familiar with Camp Quest, they run a summer camp for secular kids every year. As the camp has been running for a number of years, more and more of the original camps are growing up to become qualified campers and future leaders. They’re a great organization and we hope you’ll do what you can for them.

It is a well-understood and even tiresome habit of bigots and bullies that they adopt the language of those they oppress in order to make themselves seem righteous in thought and deed. Heck, even old Adolf got into the act with his famous justification for the “racial purity” platform that ultimately killed millions. “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord!” (Emphasis added, because why be subtle?)

It’s not really Godwinning when it’s accurate, is it?

So this is how a noted and infamous hate group of hateful bigots, the American “Family” Association, can convince themselves that those who criticize them and who stand for equality and against discrimination are the true bigots. Because when self-righteousness takes up residence in very tiny brains, it must drag self-awareness into the trash to free up disc space.

And so you get the comical spectacle of the AFA condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling “Christian organizations who support the Biblical definition of marriage as ‘hate’ groups and falsely disseminat[ing] this information to liberal news media,” and they post that right next to a panel proving just what a hate group they really are (by describing LGBT marriage equality as forcing poor put-upon Christians to embrace “sexual perversion”). It would be a lot funnier if folks like this really weren’t so dedicated to hurting actual people.

Check out central Texas, and you’ll find the Atheist Community of Austin on their map, for which we are enormously proud. When the kind of people who call hate “love” and love “perversion” decide you’re the bad guy, you know you’re really on the side of the angels.

Not all cults are religious. Attributes of a cult include traits such as: unquestioning commitment to one or more leaders, who are considered unaccountable to any authorities; punishment of dissent; mind-altering practices such as meditation and chanting; and deceptive recruitment practices. Many organizations that are not overtly religious still exhibit many of these traits. In this panel we will discuss some examples of this phenomenon, such as the Amway and other multi-level businesses, the self-help movement, and some homeschooling organizations.

A debate about the issue of “true” religion: some atheists claim that we can say that some versions (like fundementalists) of a religion are the “true” version of those religions becuase of their relative consistency and loyalty to the scriptures, while other atheists bring different reasons to refute this, for example the subjective nature of the religion. This panel is a debate between the proponents of these two positions.

With all that in mind, I also want to say something about social awareness. Managing a group like the Secular Student Alliance is a big challenge. The Campus Crusade for Christ is a massive organization that represents one of the largest religions in the world. To many Christians, participating in a group like this can supposedly influence whether or not you will have eternal happiness. For clubs that promote skepticism and secularism, the rewards are much more abstract.